Burning the Empty Nests is Gregory Orr's earliest full-length collection. Filled with surrealism, these are poems steeped in emotion. Even if you are not quite sure what is going on, Orr's linguistic playfulness and experimentation will move you.
As an example of the playfulness of Orr's verse, the short "Love Poem" stands out:
A black biplane crashes through the window
of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down,
removing his leather hood.
He hands me my grandmother's jade ring.
No, it's two robin's eggs and
a telephone number: yours.
There are very few long poems in this collection. But the myriad of short poems are a bit like snow globes in that they present to the reader these tiny, yet fully-developed and contained worlds.
Despite the lightness of most of these poems, evidence of Orr's troubled childhood are visible if you know what to look for. When Orr was only twelve years old, he shot and killed his younger brother in a tragic hunting accident. Many poems in his later collections, as well as his memoir, The Blessing, deal directly with this event. But traces of this past are evident in the poems of Burning the Empty Nests, such as the eerie poem "The Doll":
I carry you in a glass jar.
Your face is porcelain
except for the bullet hole
like a black mole on your cheek.
I want to make you whole again,
but you are growing smaller.
It is almost too late.
The final section of this collection is called "The Adventures of the Stone." These cleverly crafted poems personify a stone, giving it human qualities, and having it fall in love with a wound. These lines are from "The Stone in Winter," which is perhaps my favorite poem in this section:
The stone lives in a snow house in the woods.
At night, it sits in the cage
the moonlight makes when it falls
through the branches of a leafless tree.
Orr has won many awards for his work, which ranges in voice, tone and style. If you can't find this early work of his, you might be interested in The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems, which is his most recent collection.
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